AI and the Economy

[neverdie]

Look at a nation like Ireland. How much of its economy is made up of big tech? Enormous part of it. Thousands upon thousands of layoffs down the line (inevitable).

As to where the needle settles (employees to AI and machine outsourcing) is not known but I do know that it means Ireland and nations like it are massively over-exposed due to lack of diversity in tax receipts. More nuance than that, and happy to take it from any who has it, but Ireland would be wise to start building houses again. The tech sector looks like a disaster to me within the next twenty years because there just won't be the jobs there to sustain a tax-based system whereby Ireland accepts 12.5% corporation tax in return for things like jobs and development (infrastructure). It then taxes the wages of the people who work at companies which take advantage of the 12.5% rate. But what happens when these people are gone? Ireland loses an awful lot of revenue and it seems inevitable to me.

Won't just be Ireland (will be global) but Ireland is leveraged almost uniquely around the world in terms of how much revenue it receives from these companies.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Look at a nation like Ireland. How much of its economy is made up of big tech? Enormous part of it. Thousands upon thousands of layoffs down the line (inevitable).

As to where the needle settles (employees to AI and machine outsourcing) is not known but I do know that it means Ireland and nations like it are massively over-exposed due to lack of diversity in tax receipts. More nuance than that, and happy to take it from any who has it, but Ireland would be wise to start building houses again. The tech sector looks like a disaster to me within the next twenty years because there just won't be the jobs there to sustain a tax-based system whereby Ireland accepts 12.5% corporation tax in return for things like jobs and development (infrastructure). It then taxes the wages of the people who work at companies which take advantage of the 12.5% rate. But what happens when these people are gone? Ireland loses an awful lot of revenue and it seems inevitable to me.

Won't just be Ireland (will be global) but Ireland is leveraged almost uniquely around the world in terms of how much revenue it receives from these companies.

You're conflating a few different issues here. If these tech firms get more profitable (which is obviously what they're hoping for, by going all in on AI) then that means more tax revenue for Ireland, not less. The corporate tax paid to the Irish exchequer by these companies dwarfs whatever PAYE tax income we get from their employees. Whether Trump allows these companies to continue to headquarter here for tax reasons is the big risk, which has nothing to do with AI.

If AI allows the tech firms massively reduce their workforce then that's a problem for employment levels in Ireland. Although might actually improve one of our biggest issues, which is accommodation in Dublin. Having thousands of extraordinarily well paid tech employees living here has been a huge inflationary pressure on the Dublin rental market (and cost of living in general).

 

[neverdie]

You're conflating a few different issues here. If these tech firms get more profitable (which is obviously what they're hoping for, by going all in on AI) then that means more tax revenue for Ireland, not less. The corporate tax paid to the Irish exchequer by these companies dwarfs whatever PAYE tax income we get from their employees. Whether Trump allows these companies to continue to headquarter here for tax reasons is the big risk, which has nothing to do with AI.

That's the part I was getting at re nuance. I know that the declared profits taxed at CT rates is much higher than the wages taxed but what happens when/if these companies do not require an Irish headquarter?

If AI allows the tech firms massively reduce their workforce then that's a problem for employment levels in Ireland. Although might actually improve one of our biggest issues, which is accommodation in Dublin. Having thousands of extraordinarily well paid tech employees living here has been a huge inflationary pressure on the Dublin rental market (and cost of living in general).

I'd like to see housing, healthcare, and education solved in Ireland. Housing is the worst of the three right now but healthcare lags behind it. It's just a question of where these workers go? What else can you do at that level of payment? Nothing that I can see.

 

[Massive Spanner]

I work in a creative tech house and our design team are all UX first. We had a network of illustrators which we have worked with for 10+ years and I was speaking to the head of design a couple of weeks ago and he said they haven’t contracted anything to them in the last 18 months because they use AI instead now. The only assets we have received from external sources are from brands who control their IP.



Honestly it’s fecking scary. I might be naive but I think my job is relatively for the next year or two but beyond that who knows? Even in a secure role the glut of out of work developers is only going to make our salary trajectory shite.

We had a AI crisis workshop last week lead by our head of tech and he basically said that we are in a good position being a small tech house because there’s very little red tape. We can start playing with these technologies now and offering AI solutions to our customers and begin to capitalise on it today while the bigger companies (hopefully) waste time setting up their policies and teams and are slower picking up new technologies as it drops.

It's impossible to predict. my (completely uninformed) take is, these big companies will eventually figure out that they can't just substitute AI for people and continue to have infinite growth, and we will start to see hiring sprees again. I also think there's a bit of a standstill around RTO, that is, companies are reluctant to hire until they know which way it's going, and people are reluctant to leave their jobs for worse scenarios, as well as that, the market is skewed toward more remote/hybrid roles.

We'll never go back to Covid levels of hiring but I do think another year or two and we'll probably go back closer to pre-Covid once the AI boom dies down, and it will die down, for a while anyway.

 

[Massive Spanner]

If AI allows the tech firms massively reduce their workforce then that's a problem for employment levels in Ireland. Although might actually improve one of our biggest issues, which is accommodation in Dublin. Having thousands of extraordinarily well paid tech employees living here has been a huge inflationary pressure on the Dublin rental market (and cost of living in general).

The government could fecking help by taking tech off of the skilled visas list. Loads of people already in the country struggling to get jobs and meanwhile people from outside can still come in and take what's there and only compound the housing crisis. It's crazy!

 

[Pexbo]

You're conflating a few different issues here. If these tech firms get more profitable (which is obviously what they're hoping for, by going all in on AI) then that means more tax revenue for Ireland, not less. The corporate tax paid to the Irish exchequer by these companies dwarfs whatever PAYE tax income we get from their employees. Whether Trump allows these companies to continue to headquarter here for tax reasons is the big risk, which has nothing to do with AI.

If AI allows the tech firms massively reduce their workforce then that's a problem for employment levels in Ireland. Although might actually improve one of our biggest issues, which is accommodation in Dublin. Having thousands of extraordinarily well paid tech employees living here has been a huge inflationary pressure on the Dublin rental market (and cost of living in general).

OpenAI have a £500bn kitty to build new data centres across the US. I expect Trump will also cut corporation tax massively for tech companies because it’s an arms race right now. They have the potential to replace and centralise a huge percentage of the workforce globally.


I guess the only thing that could work in Ireland (and other countries favour) is the benefits of a global CDN.



What I really don’t get is what these tech oligarchs want long term. If they replace the majority of the workforce globally, how do they expect to make money from a decimated economy? If we’re going to go all black mirror, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable with these sociopathic ghouls - I honestly wouldn’t rule out that their utopia in 20-30 years is a massively depopulated world which addresses climate change and AI replacing the workforce.

 

[VeevaVee]

AI in architecture and surveying is interesting. On the design side, I don’t know if it could actually do more than an initial plan, because requests are so specific to the client’s needs that it’s unlikely to be right and would require editing anyway. Just inputting the requests would require plenty of human work. It could massively speed up the process though if implemented in autocad well. It could also pump out a schedule of works/spec easily, with human amendments for certain things.

The project management side will always require a human I would think. As will actually looking at defects in surveying, even if it becomes as simple as taking a photo and the AI making suggestions. At least until intelligent robots are walking amongst us, then we’re all fecked or living in bliss. Probably fecked.

 

[Pexbo]

It's impossible to predict. my (completely uninformed) take is, these big companies will eventually figure out that they can't just substitute AI for people and continue to have infinite growth, and we will start to see hiring sprees again. I also think there's a bit of a standstill around RTO, that is, companies are reluctant to hire until they know which way it's going, and people are reluctant to leave their jobs for worse scenarios, as well as that, the market is skewed toward more remote/hybrid roles.

We'll never go back to Covid levels of hiring but I do think another year or two and we'll probably go back closer to pre-Covid once the AI boom dies down, and it will die down, for a while anyway.

I hope you’re right.

A good point I saw on Reddit is that the context for these LLMs is currently trivial. Copilot edits allows up to ten files and shits the bed of one of them is a 10k line json. We maintain code bases that are millions of lines of code and we seem to be a good way away from an LLM that can work with that level of context - being trained on a codebase just isn’t the same thing when it’s constantly being updated.

 

[tenpoless]

And then there's also the fact that even if the AI is capable of writing the code, prompting is almost an art form. You need to be very precise with the formulation of your requirements which again requires to think them through. I don't know many product owners who are capable of this if any. Especially since many details only become apparent when you are actually implementing their ideas and many issues are solved by thoughtful engineers without them even knowing. Understanding how code works helps you enormously with prompting. As you said, in the midterm it will primarily increase the productivity of coders as it minimizes the time you have to spend on research.

I agree. I dont know about other fields but some programming tasks especially ones that are very business domain specific requires creative prompting. Esentially you have to tell the AI how to think. You cant expect it to give a ready to use solution by just giving it requirements in bullet points. You have to guide it and if its wrong point out which parts needed correcting, like talking to a person than a bot. Basically the person who does the prompt has to be knowledgable and if they know all the details thats a guaranteed better result. And if there are alot of edge cases what started as prompting might end up with you ironing out the details by yourself when the AI gets stuck on a loop without addressing what you want it to. It tends to be faster that way.

 

[adexkola]

I think some professions are doomed long term. If you're a pure coder, forget about it

If you have experience building end to end products (not just a component) that fit to business and customer needs, there's a place for you in this world, even with GenAI.

Also, important to remember that the tech sector is shedding talent, but other industries need tech talent too. Education, health, government, retail, manufacturing, defense... All need tech to varying degrees. It feels like we're in the midst of a recession with layoffs across the board but once the market picks up again so will the hiring.

Generative AI is nowhere near the point of replacing people's jobs. If they tell you that, they're just offshoring your job to India.

AI in architecture and surveying is interesting. On the design side, I don’t know if it could actually do more than an initial plan, because requests are so specific to the client’s needs that it’s unlikely to be right and would require editing anyway. It could massively speed up the process though if implemented in autocad well. It could also pump out a schedule of works/spec easily, with human amendments for certain things.

The project management side will always require a human I would think. As will actual looking at defects and surveying, even if it become as simple as taking a photo and the AI making suggestions. At least until intelligent robots are walking amongst us, then we’re all fecked or living bliss. Probably fecked.

Also good point. There are some industries where AI cannot displace humans until it proves it is overwhelmingly more accurate and precise, overcoming valid legal/regulatory/liability concerns. Healthcare and engineering? We aren't there yet (and won't be for another decade).

Self driving cars are a better indicator of where we are at with AI's evolution.

 

[afrocentricity]

a decade is a short fecking time really. enjoy it as things are about to change, hopefully for the better

 

[tenpoless]

I might be wrong but if everyone has an easy access to good AI models. Then it will even out the playing field. Rather than companies trying to get ahead by using AI, theyd just accept it as a daily driver of their businesses, like internet. So they wouldnt be so reactive in laying people off or at least give them a chance to still work but have their responsibility expanded due to the help of AI. Than shrinking their responsibility or worse, sacking them. Thats why DeepSeek really excited me. Because we need it to be mainstream asap.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

OpenAI have a £500bn kitty to build new data centres across the US. I expect Trump will also cut corporation tax massively for tech companies because it’s an arms race right now. They have the potential to replace and centralise a huge percentage of the workforce globally.


I guess the only thing that could work in Ireland (and other countries favour) is the benefits of a global CDN.



What I really don’t get is what these tech oligarchs want long term. If they replace the majority of the workforce globally, how do they expect to make money from a decimated economy? If we’re going to go all black mirror, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable with these sociopathic ghouls - I honestly wouldn’t rule out that their utopia in 20-30 years is a massively depopulated world which addresses climate change and AI replacing the workforce.

Aren’t they generally in favour of Basic Income? Their end game is probably doing away with nation states to create their own dystopian sovereign tech states where the mass unemployed trickle their UBI (probably cryptocurrency) back into the pockets of their billionaire overlords, to pay for virtual reality experiences that distract them from the monotony of their existence.

 

[Pexbo]

Aren’t they generally in favour of Basic Income? Their end game is probably doing away with nation states to create their own dystopian sovereign tech states where the mass unemployed trickle their UBI (probably cryptocurrency) back into the pockets of their billionaire overlords, to pay for virtual reality experiences that distract them from the monotony of their existence.

Maybe but people need a purpose. The main reason I’m scared of my job as a programmer disappearing isn’t the money. It’s because I genuinely love it, I spent 4 years at Uni and have spent 5 years at my current company and it really feels like I have found my calling. The idea that I’ll no longer be able to do this every day for a living is really depressing. The idea that I’ll just have a basic income fed to me and will have to find some way of keeping myself entertained is depressing and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

UBI as a concept was about equality and ensuring everyone has enough to live, you should then have a career alongside it to pursue. Good luck controlling a population of ambitious, motivated, intelligent people who have no way of focusing their energy into something productive.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Maybe but people need a purpose. The main reason I’m scared of my job as a programmer disappearing isn’t the money. It’s because I genuinely love it, I spent 4 years at Uni and have spent 5 years at my current company and it really feels like I have found my calling. The idea that I’ll no longer be able to do this every day for a living is really depressing. The idea that I’ll just have a basic income fed to me and will have to find some way of keeping myself entertained is depressing and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

UBI as a concept was about equality and ensuring everyone has enough to live, you should then have a career alongside it to pursue. Good luck controlling a population of ambitious, motivated, intelligent people who have no way of focusing their energy into something productive.

I'm sure they think there are other pursuits the proles can follow to keep them occupied. Learn an instrument, volunteer to help the elderly, whatever. The mental health of a nation probably isn't high up their agenda anyway.

 

[neverdie]

doing away with nation states to create their own dystopian sovereign tech states

This is their lauded philosophy which is complete and utter shite. The nation state will outlive any technological superstructure currently in existence and many to follow.

What they want is what you wrote and you see Gaza (to take it as a non-nation state) and Lebanon (where they're building a resort type thing) and other areas being cited/highlighted for their basically dsytopian and blind philosophies. That they spout this, which is not novel (go back to Egypt or Greece), is evidence of their stupidity. Their economic position announces itself and they think it's disruptive and ego-centric behaviour (they may as well have no minds). The things they put forth were put forth many times and they never work.

Moreover, capitalism is basically dead. We're witnessing its collapse imo. What comes next is anyone's guess but it won't be the economy people knew for as long as you can count.

 

[Zehner]

I might be wrong but if everyone has an easy access to good AI models. Then it will even out the playing field. Rather than companies trying to get ahead by using AI, theyd just accept it as a daily driver of their businesses, like internet. So they wouldnt be so reactive in laying people off or at least give them a chance to still work but have their responsibility expanded due to the help of AI. Than shrinking their responsibility or worse, sacking them. Thats why DeepSeek really excited me. Because we need it to be mainstream asap.

One big cost factor is computing capacity. ChatGPT is approximately already costing $200m p. a. It will be HUGELY important that AI is democratized, though. From an economic perspective, it is free manpower so it should make all kind of goods more affordable but what is more likely to happen is that the profits it generates through productivity increases will end up in the pockets of those who "possess" AI. I mean, you could argue that we all possess AI because it was trained with information all of us provided on the internet but in reality, the direct profiteurs will be those who developed the models and those who use them to replace humans in their businesses.

I really, really hope there will be Wikipedia type of AI applications. But it will also require a cultural shift. The average person probably needs to become more entrepreunistic since apps like ChatGPT provide manpower for free.

 

[afrocentricity]

Maybe but people need a purpose. The main reason I’m scared of my job as a programmer disappearing isn’t the money. It’s because I genuinely love it, I spent 4 years at Uni and have spent 5 years at my current company and it really feels like I have found my calling. The idea that I’ll no longer be able to do this every day for a living is really depressing. The idea that I’ll just have a basic income fed to me and will have to find some way of keeping myself entertained is depressing and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

UBI as a concept was about equality and ensuring everyone has enough to live, you should then have a career alongside it to pursue. Good luck controlling a population of ambitious, motivated, intelligent people who have no way of focusing their energy into something productive.

Why would they not be able to find ways to be productive? I intend to, jobs change, skillsets grow and adapt...

My purpose right now has nothing to do with my employment, so i cannot relate very well but a purpose will change according to where you are at in life and what is happening around you.

I think we will have purpose, and we will be able to be as productive as we like, if we have a valuable service that we can provide. My main concerns are what type of world will we be in? What would life look like?

 

[rcoobc]

AI in architecture and surveying is interesting. On the design side, I don’t know if it could actually do more than an initial plan, because requests are so specific to the client’s needs that it’s unlikely to be right and would require editing anyway. Just inputting the requests would require plenty of human work. It could massively speed up the process though if implemented in autocad well. It could also pump out a schedule of works/spec easily, with human amendments for certain things.

The project management side will always require a human I would think. As will actually looking at defects in surveying, even if it becomes as simple as taking a photo and the AI making suggestions. At least until intelligent robots are walking amongst us, then we’re all fecked or living in bliss. Probably fecked.

Yeah I am very interested in AI in surveying and architecture. Not sure if it's just too specific for it to make a huge effect, or if it will change everything